PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Julia Fine is the author of The Upstairs House, winner of the Chicago Review of Books Award for Fiction, and What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award. Her third novel, Maddalena and the Dark, is forthcoming in June 2023. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and children.
Maddalena and the Dark is chocolate laced with poison. To read it is to fall under an enchantment . . . Julia Fine is a writer of ferocious talent and originality, and . . . she has crafted a sweeping, dark fairy tale about the violent hearts of teenage girls. I loved it from the first sentence to the astonishing final lines -- Katie Gutierrez From its first sentence, this novel curled its crooked little witch's finger around my heart and still hasn't let go . . . Maddalena and the Dark completely seduced me with its menace, and it is undoubtedly Fine's best yet -- Amy Jo Burns Maddalena and the Dark is a tense, slow-burning portrait of how desire too easily tangles with envy and the price we pay when we get what we want . . . Maddalena and the Dark is a book to be savored, felt, and reread -- Isle McElroy Maddalena and the Dark is an ecstatic, immersive, layered and astonishingly rendered depiction of girlhood, ambition, violence, art, and desire -- Lynn Steger Strong Maddalena and the Dark is the book of my dreams - a feverish, intimate story of obsession and ambition, set in Venice's shadowy canals and glittering palazzos, with an ending that still keeps me up at night. Fine's writing is magnetic and unstoppable. I can't stop talking to people about this book! -- Sara Sligar
